Colin and me, CE-5 Monthly Group Event: October 21, evening, Brown County Indiana

Son Colin and I attended our first monthly CE-5 group contact event (always held at New Moon, when sky is darkest, and lights can be more readily seen), last night at Jeff and Amy Becker’s homestead in Brown County. Just as in September when we participated in the 5-day Kosta Makreas workshop to learn the protocols for loving ET group contact, and to enjoy five nights of viewing the skies, learning the differences between planes — they always blink, though sometimes hard to see if they’re heading towards you), satellites (there’s an app for that), and meteors — once again we were sitting in a circle of reclining lawn chairs, bundled up in the cooling air and craning our necks every which way, calling out odd sights that may or may not be ET, when all of a sudden, fairly early on, most of us witnessed a large, brilliant and slow fading flash high in the sky to the south. Just a single, powerful flash, with a soft brilliant glow, clearly communicating, to those of us who saw it and said so, sheer love. LOVE, indeed, compassion! — for us poor myopic skeptical humans who still think we need proof as to whether the “visitors” really exist.

On the same night, hundreds of other local CE-5 groups were also participating, including Kosta and his psychic wife Hollis, with a group in southern California. Here’s Kosta’s fb comment on last evening’s experience there.

Wow!

For me, who used to regularly and thrillingly zoom into the night sky from my body while sleeping in the backyard as a kid, and who has long been enamored of the night sky, especially when in places where the sky dominates — southern Idaho, where I grew up, a desert with 360° bowl sky; the dark brilliance of the winter night sky contrasted with snowy sagebrush flats at my yurt across from the magnificent Tetons in Jackson Hole; last summer in Mongolia, where yurt dwellers live inside “99 layers of sky and 77 layers of earth;”and now, Brown County, Indiana, which, while the horizon may be interrupted by forest spires, and while the ambient light of both little Nashville and Bloomington does fade the dark somewhat — the evening was, once again, experienced as a coming home, to both others who also enjoy/endure a cosmic perspective, and to my own childhood self.

And what’s almost embarrassing to admit: though I have been an astrologer for over four decades, I never really learned the night sky beyond/behind the zodiac! “What’s that bright star?” I kept pointing, and asking Jeff: “That’s Capella,” he’d say, patiently; “that’s Altair.” He used his laser to trace out some of the sky patterns humans have identified “since time immemorial” — for example, Cassiopaia, shaped like a “W,” which was nearly straight above us as the evening began, and the seemingly gentle smudge we call the Pleiades, near the eastern horizon when we got there, and slowly rising over the hours.

By next month, I swear, I will have learned the shapes and relative positions of the major constellations and their principal stars. I might even go some way towards learning the legends that accompany them, an ancient lore that connects us to our ancestors. It’s about time! Some (few) astrologers do work with fixed stars as a regular part of their practice. But I’ve been myopic, working mostly only with this purely local system, our teensy-weensy solar system, its Sun trailing planets which appear as (graphed on paper) small to large concentric and interacting cycles inside the 20° band (the ecliptic) across the sky through which the Sun travels.

One exception, for me, and for most astrologers, is the astro chart of Donald Trump, who was born with kingly Regulus conjunct both Mars and Ascendant in late Leo. In other words, Trump was born to rule; to dominate with his “royal” presence. Whether or not we like it. And when coupled with his Sun conjunct unpredictable Uranus and opposing Moon, in Gemini/Sagittarius, the continuous, seemingly crazy whooshing of his words and ideas, often contradictory and otherwise outrageous, he leaves us continually flabbergasted with delight or disgust or both. But he doesn’t care. He is Regulus. He rules.

Yes, the presence of a powerful fixed star can be decisive in the life of a person, though not usually so extreme.

My own Sun is at 27° Sagittarius, “conjunct the Galactic Center”! What? What does that mean? And now scientists claim that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Might this black hole magnetism be connected to my obsession with the human prospect for nuclear extinction since I was two years old, when Hiroshima was incinerated and I stood at my mother’s side as she and her relatives whooped with delight to hear the news on the big radio console? I “woke up” during that broadcast; my lifelong discomfort with the human condition began that day. How could they be so happy at something so horrible? For them, Hiroshima signified that the war was over, that my father would come home. Me? From that moment on I morphed into “chicken little” and could only pretend to be a child, to play without a care in the world. Inside, the fate of the entire world rested on my tiny shoulders. Inside, I relived the nuclear flash over and over again.

I’m sure that if we connect the zodiac to the starry sky beyond we will find lots of connections like this, that link transiting planets to particular fixed stars beyond. We will recognize how some people’s destinies don’t seem to be explained by just zodiacal data. That there’s something so much larger pulling them.

Ultimately, to pay attention to the night sky is to recognize both our own abject insignificance and our utter majesty. For we and the visitors are connected. Indeed we are in communion with them. Telepathy is real, and it winks the entire universe into oneness.

Let us never forget that fact as we go about our daily lives, dividing and separating and competing for “goods,” pretending that little stuff matters, that only little stuff matters. It all matters. All of it. The very word “matter” comes from “mater,” and means MOTHER!.

Mother Earth, Father Sky.

Or is it the other way around?

Yes, there are legends, and legends within legends, and all of them connecting, many of them seemingly contradictory. (Mother Earth or Mother Sky? Father Sky or Father Earth?) Which just goes to show: let’s not get too wrapped up in our mental prisons/projections that say this is so rather than that! It’s all real, and it’s all fluff; and the meanings we find or make up are all real too, an endless, mysterious creative force spinning wheels within wheels of splendid tales and high strangeness.

P.S. Readers curious about this alternative view of the function of the mind might want to check out Alt-Epistemology.